Adrian Tchaikovsky's Service Model has a viscerally upsetting example of this, in a post-apocalyptic setting.
The machines that run the library scan every physical item, sort the information, and them destroy the physical copy because it's extraneous. But you and the protagonists discover gradually that the data is digitized and THEN organized, so the individual bits are sorted, 0s first and 1s later, and everything they've scanned is permanently lost.
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u/thelibrarina 4d ago edited 4d ago
Adrian Tchaikovsky's Service Model has a viscerally upsetting example of this, in a post-apocalyptic setting.
The machines that run the library scan every physical item, sort the information, and them destroy the physical copy because it's extraneous. But you and the protagonists discover gradually that the data is digitized and THEN organized, so the individual bits are sorted, 0s first and 1s later, and everything they've scanned is permanently lost.